Michael Portillo’s parents would not have met but for the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War that was immortalised in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica painting.

Luis Portillo sided with the Republicans against General Franco before escaping to Britain in 1939 with the help of a Labour politician. Five of his six brothers remained to fight for Franco. After the bombing of Guernica, 4,000 children arrived in Britain, and some settled in a house near Oxford, Mr Portillo said, where his mother was an undergraduate. “My father arrived in 1939 and went to the same place. My parents